GC 2024 Last Day
Delegates to the 2024 General Conference were dancing in the aisles on the last day, anticipating the new United Methodist Church they legislated. Now the Council of Bishops has unveiled a new vision statement intending to move the church farther into its new future. (Photo by Mike DuBose, UM News)
A United Methodist Insight Editorial
The headline on an email from a research firm proclaimed, “We’re Living in the Upside Down.”
Well, DUH!
Of course, the headline meant to refer to President Donald Trump’s poll ratings as “upside down,” or “underwater,” as pollsters said. In plain English, surveys show that more people disapprove of the president’s performance – on all fronts – than approve of him.
“The Upside Down” phrase comes from a highly popular Netflix series, “Stranger Things,” that captivated viewers a few years ago. It was the term for a horrifying alternate realm, accessed by reckless scientific experiments, populated with creatures that would just as soon kill you as look at you.
These days I’m not sure where The Upside Down ends and Real Life begins. With all that has radically altered in the past few months, like Dorothy Gale I’m sure we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto (even Kansas isn’t Kansas anymore, so I’ve heard).
None of the old rules apply to Real Life. Every human encounter presents an opportunity to be scared, scorned or scarred. The milk of human kindness has soured, and we didn’t even get a chance to churn buttermilk.
Right now, a lot of us are reacting to daily shenanigans with our prehistoric “fight, flee or freeze” response –mostly flee if possible, ‘cuz fight gets us nowhere and freeze is too painful. Nonetheless, I think we’re being given an opportunity – messy and uncertain though it is – to make a new Right-side Up. Here’s why.
Each week, dozens of stories come across my laptop about people who exhibit the kind of common decency we once took for granted. They’re the people whose names often don’t get into the news except when they’re “hatched, matched or dispatched,” as we used to say when we put ink on paper. They’re still out there, though; it’s just harder to find them, swimming as we do in an ocean of misleading information.
We took these good folks for granted too long. A lot of them were in our parents’ generation, and they’re dying off faster than flowers in 100-degree summer heat. (But climate change is a hoax, sez the prez).
It’s a cliché to be sure, but in the face of such social disruption, we are the people we’ve waited for. All it will take to go from Upside Down to Right-side Up is a little more awareness, a little more restraint, a lot less ego and maybe an old song or two.
For instance, all week long some old lyrics have been buzzing around my brain:
“Nothing’s impossible, I have found, for when my chin is on the ground,
“I pick myself up, dust myself off, start all over again.”
Composed in 1936 by Jerome Kern, with lyrics by Dorothy Fields, “Pick Yourself Up” may be hokey as all-get-out to us in the 21st century, especially if we watch the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers clip on YouTube. Consider, though: it was composed during the Great Depression, another upside-down time when people really needed hope that the country – indeed the world – could get out of the economic calamity that was starving people everywhere.
This brings me, in a roundabout way, to the new vision statement unveiled May 1 by the United Methodist Council of Bishops with cooperation from the Connectional Table. Just as the General Board of Church and Society crafted the new Social Principles, the Connectional Table held consultations with United Methodists around the world in the years after the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the CT’s executive officer Judi Kenaston, one message was abundantly clear:
United Methodists want their church to be in ministry with people who live on the margins.
Shades of John and Charles Wesley! The new vision statement’s emphasis on “love-serve-lead” brings a 21st century version of where Methodism started in the slums of England, spreading to the hardscrabble farms of fledgling America and back to city slums again as the world industrialized.
There’s nothing new under the sun, says scripture, but we humans keep inventing new takes on old evils, leaving us to start all over again seeking new ways to do good.
No doubt there will be a lot of grousing among longtime United Methodists that the new vision doesn’t grab people by their unsaved lapels and beat them into salvation. There’s a good reason for that – that old method doesn’t work today, if it ever did. We must start all over again with new language in new places with people who don’t look like us, talk like us, think like us.
But “those people” ache and need and love like us, and God loves every blessed one of them, because God made them in the divine image just like us. It’s time we got back to seeing our neighbors as neighbors, not as menacing interlopers who are going to take from us what we think they’re not entitled to have.
Truthfully, none of us is entitled to what we have. That’s the astounding miracle of God’s grace – we don’t earn it, we can’t buy it, we don’t deserve it, but God through Christ gives us grace anyway. John Newton, the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” got that right: it’s grace that brought us thus far, and grace will lead us home.
Maybe that’s why we’re living in The Upside Down – we got the circumstances we deserve because we hoarded God’s grace instead of living it out and passing it on. We’ve stripped the Earth. We’ve trashed our democracy. We’ve crashed Christ’s church. We’ve selfishly forfeited the work of human relationships, bypassing the friction of their necessary give-and-take by forgoing the lubrication of a little courtesy, a helping hand, a smile, and a lot less ego.
The new UMC vision may not be the ideal many of us would like. Yet our alternative is to lie here, dusty and cranky in The Upside Down, waiting for the monsters to get us. Better to take a chance to start all over again.